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Chapter 3: Body as Evidence: The Facts of Blackness, the Fictions of Whiteness
- State University of New York Press
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Chapter 3 Body as Evidence The Facts of Blackness, the Fictions of Whiteness On February 20, 2006, I guest lectured for a graduate seminar on Black Popular Culture, at Duke University. There I was to engage students in conversation about my first book, Venus in the Dark, which examines the visual legacies of black women’s sexual representations—beginning with the “Hottentot Venus,” as embodied by South African Sara Baartman.1 Our conversation, remarkably, reflected a great deal of distress and dis‑ease with Baartman’s story, as many found it disconcerting that I emphasized her “victimization,” rather than consider her “sexual agency” in performing as a sexualized ethnic curiosity in Europe. When I reminded everyone that, whether or not we wished to view Baartman as a “victim” or “agent,” we cannot overlook the simple fact that, in death, her private parts were carved out, dissected, and preserved in a jar of formaldehyde fluid, which was also placed on full display at a scientific museum in Paris, the class fell silent. Less than a month later, on March 13, 2006, a young black college student, who was eventually named to the world as Crystal Gail Mangum, performed as an exotic dancer at a private party hosted by members of the Duke Lacrosse team before bringing forth a charge that she had been raped, sodomized, and bound in a bathroom by three men at that party. A year later, we would witness a nation divided, once again, over racial and sexual issues, where media attention would distort the facts of what occurred that night. Finally, on April 11, 2007, all charges would be dropped against three of the players—David Evans, Reade Seligmann, and Colin Finnerty—who would also be declared, as big screaming letters emblazoned across CNN’s screen: “THEY’RE INNOCENT!” 65 66 Body as Evidence And black leaders, such as Jesse Jackson, who had offered through his Rainbow Coalition a scholarship to Mangum so that she could attend college without entering sex work, would be brought on various CNN news programs to be coerced into admitting “guilt” in assuming the white men to be guilty of rape, when Jackson’s point was that “I just wanted to offer the young woman an opportunity to support her children and attend college without having to dance naked in a room full of white boys.” Such a comment underlies the anxiety of interracial sexual violence and the failure of black patriarchal protection, which grates against the dominant narrative invested in black guilt and white innocence. It also recalls a visual history—“dance naked in a room full of white boys”—of white subjugation of the disrobed black body, whether through slave ships, auction blocks, scientific scrutiny in cases such as Baartman’s, or unequal entertainment stages and screens. Incidentally, charges against the Duke athletes were dropped the same day that NBC decided to fire radio personality Don Imus for his use of racial and sexual epithets against the Rutgers University women’s basketball team during his radio program. And, no sooner were the charges dropped than ABC and a few other news networks started showing pictures of and identifying the Duke Lacrosse accuser, subsequently inspiring some of the most racist and misogynistic blogs and commentaries all over the Internet. One commentary by John Lillpop, featured on a blog called “The Conservative Voice,” invoked Imus’s controversial words with the title: “Crystal Gail Mangum: Nappyheaded Ho?” I offer this preamble because I am interested in examining the national distress over black female bodies, the cultural investment in white innocence, and also what I see as a cultural legacy of responding to black women’s sexual representations through the specter of racialized sexual violence. Using the example of the Duke Lacrosse rape scandal in 2006 and drawing on racial scientific history and contemporary popular culture, I argue that mass media reports and other modes of popular culture, combined with science and technology through DNA discourse, conspire to create recognizable tropes and readings of the black female body through historical associations of deviance, illicit sexuality, and criminality. I further explore how, at other moments, the black female body serves as a conduit for the reshaping and redrawing of racial, sexual, and class divisions. Above all, I interrogate how these representations, these “facts of blackness”—to recall Fanon’s description of the black body evoking convenient racial stereotypes—seem to be supported by what I term the “fictions of whiteness,” in which exists a racial...